Using Auto Healing to Replace Failed Instances

Every instance has an AWS OpsWorks Stacks agent that communicates regularly with the
service.
AWS OpsWorks Stacks uses that communication to monitor instance health. If an agent
does not
communicate with the service for more than approximately five minutes, AWS OpsWorks
Stacks
considers the instance to have failed.

Auto healing is set at the layer level; you can change the auto healing setting by
editing layer settings, as shown in the following screenshot.

Note

An instance can be a member of multiple layers. If any of those layers has auto
healing disabled, AWS OpsWorks Stacks does not heal the instance if it fails.

Creates a new Amazon EC2 instance with the same host name,
configuration, and layer membership.

Reattaches any Amazon EBS volumes, including volumes that were attached
after the old instance was originally started.

Assigns a new public and private IP Address.

If the old instance was associated with an Elastic IP address,
associates the new instance with the same IP address.

Amazon EBS-backed instance

Stops the Amazon EC2 instance, and verifies that it has stopped.

Starts the EC2 instance.

After the auto-healed instance is back online, AWS OpsWorks Stacks triggers a Configure
lifecycle
event on all of the stack's instances. The associated stack
configuration and deployment attributes include the instance's public and
private IP addresses. Custom Configure recipes can obtain the new IP addresses from
the
node object.

If you specify an Amazon EBS volume for a
layer's instances, AWS OpsWorks Stacks creates a new volume and attaches it to each
instance
when the instance is started. If you later want to detach the volume from an instance,
use the Resources page.

When AWS OpsWorks Stacks auto heals one of a layer's instances, it handles volumes
in the
following way:

If the volume was attached to the instance when the instance failed, the
volume and its data are saved, and AWS OpsWorks Stacks attaches it to the new
instance.

If the volume was not attached to the instance when the instance failed, AWS OpsWorks
Stacks creates a new, empty volume with the configuration specified by the
layer, and attaches that volume to the new instance.

Use only the AWS OpsWorks Stacks console, CLI, or API to stop instances.

If you stop an instance in any other way, such as using the Amazon EC2 console,
AWS OpsWorks Stacks treats the instance as failed, and auto heals it.

Use Amazon EBS volumes to store any data that you don't want to lose if the
instance is auto healed.

Auto healing stops the old Amazon EC2 instance, which destroys any data that is
not stored on an Amazon EBS volume. Amazon EBS volumes are reattached to the new
instance, which preserves any stored data.

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